Failure to ignite

Had another go with the new pen yesterday, following the effort reported on 11th April. The brush-pen has still not clogged or needed to be cleaned, despite irregular use, which is good news.

But it all seemed a bit dead and a bit forced, with the result illustrated.

And minor irritations continue. Quite hard to paint smooth, evenly filled lines, which look as if they had been painted in a single stroke of genius. One has to go back over them, touching them up. As with other things, for instance subroutines in a computer program, what you get on the outside often belies a rather messy interior. Impossible, at least so far, to get a line to come to a good point or to get a good corner on a square. It is all a bit ragged. And maybe I need to use a better quality paper, paper on which the paint from the pen will not soak into cracks, giving a fuzzy rather than a clean, sharp edge to the line.

On the other hand, I feel I am starting to get a glimmer of how doodling with this thing might be different from doodling with a biro, this last with its much finer line, albeit messy in a different way.

I have also remembered that I used to doodle with a brush and india ink maybe forty years ago, using lightly varnished plywood for paper. Doodling with a biro was something for long meetings at work. With a relic from this era now being used to transfer jigsaws for photography, with glimpses of black visible, for example, at 11th December 2013. I also remember that preparation of the surface with varnish did not quite eliminate the problem of the ink soaking into cracks unwanted, in this case in the grain of the wood.

PS: while the scanner has picked up the verso text, it has not picked up the hole punched in the top right hand corner. I don't detect any difference between the hole and the surrounding white. While is has picked up the blotches and blobs in areas of black fill. Bit like aerial photography and hut circles?